For Iraq veteran, PTSD is the enemy that stays on the attack, but he's fighting back

On the road ahead, a turkey vulture lurches into the air. Mike Nashif, driving at a 60-mph clip with an 18-wheeler bearing down in the oncoming lane, realizes that a collision with the bird is unavoidable. His girlfriend, Anndra Mulholland, shuts her eyes and covers her face with her arms.

As if in slow motion, Mike sees the vulture hurtle toward him. He sees it hit the windshield and explode. He sees the web of cracked glass smeared with blood and feathers.

He slams the brake and swerves to the side of the road. He stumbles to the shoulder, swallows deep gulps of air and sinks to his knees with a groan. As he crouches by the side of the road, Anndra rubs his neck and back, saying: "It's OK, we'll be all right."

Mike, a two-tour Iraq war Army veteran, checks the car. It looks like it's been hit by a rocket-propelled grenade. A direct hit, too.

The collateral damage to his psyche will prove far more difficult to measure.

In April, after eight years in the Army based at Fort Hood, Texas, Mike took early retirement for medical reasons. He spent 27 months in Iraq dodging roadside bombs, rocket-propelled grenades, mortars and snipers. He saw friends die.

He lost much more than a military career. His marriage of 12 years fell apart, and he saw his four kids only every other weekend.

Experts say that there are hundreds of thousands of veterans like Mike. That PTSD is a dangerous enemy that destroys relationships. That families of veterans with PTSD often suffer deep psychological trauma, too.

After learning how to survive in the world's most hostile environment, Mike's mission these days is to relearn how to survive as a civilian.

Fishing is one of the few activities that helps Mike relax. That's why he and Anndra, the woman he's been seeing for about a year, spent a few quiet days at a lakeside retreat before heading back home to Belton, near Fort Hood. Driving through southeast Texas, Mike had felt calm in his Honda Passport, rolling past wide-open ranches dotted with broad-limbed live oaks.

But now, as he kneels by the side of the road, inspecting the damage caused by the turkey vulture, it occurs to him that life has just fired another lesson at him.

And it's knocked him to his knees.

Married with kids

In 2001, Mike was 24 and married with two children and one on the way. He'd met his wife, Dena, in Oregon, where they'd grown up. They'd moved to Texas to be close to Dena's mother in Waxahachie. Before enlisting, Mike had worked as an assistant manager at a grocery store, making $12.50 an hour. He was ready for a change.

In boot camp, Mike's drill instructor repeatedly harped on how soldiers needed to train hard because the world could change in a split second. Sure enough, Mike's graduation took place on Sept. 12, 2001, as the nation reeled from the terrorist attacks the day before in New York, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania.

Just over two years later, in March 2004, Mike deployed from Fort Hood for a year in Iraq. He was one of the forward observers, who scouted enemy targets. Their base was in the volatile southern Baghdad sector. His 12-month tour of duty coincided with the heaviest fighting in Iraq since the initial invasion. Insurgents attacked troops with hit-and-run tactics. They ambushed convoys of Humvees and Bradley Fighting Vehicles with roadside bombs, or what the Army calls improvised explosive devices (IEDs).

On nightly missions, Mike would be either in the Bradley or a Humvee in a squad of three vehicles. The missions included patrolling hostile neighborhoods, checking houses for weapons or enemy combatants, and rebuilding roads and schools.

They were repeatedly exposed to roadside bombs. "I think my traumatic brain injury came from the repeated explosions. At least once a week, we were being hit by something," Mike says. "I think I had about 30 IEDs go off next to my vehicle, or within 25 yards of my vehicle."

One of them was a 250-pound bomb rigged to blow up in a parked car as he rolled by in his Bradley. Mike says he never heard the blast.

"You feel it, you smell it and you taste it," he says. "It's one big beat on your body. It's like somebody slapping you very hard on both sides of your body. You feel it on your toes, chest, head, fingers - all over your body."

Luckily, no one was seriously injured. Mike received a Purple Heart for shrapnel wounds on his hands and wrists, but it could have been worse. He found a piece of shrapnel embedded in the Bradley's hatch.

"A few inches closer," Mike says, "and it would have taken off my head."

During his tour, three close friends in his unit died. One was a medic who was sent home with a gunshot wound in his foot. He asked to rejoin his buddies in Iraq and was back less than a month when he was killed by an IED.

When another friend was killed by an IED, it was Mike's job to clean the shattered Humvee, removing blood and tissue from the electronics and radio gear that needed to be salvaged. "It took four hours to clean the blood out of the Humvee," he says.

Halfway through his tour, he faced perhaps his most traumatic moment: He was riding in the back of a three-vehicle convoy when the patrol was hit by a roadside bomb, mortars and gunfire. One of his closest friends, Spc. Raymond White, was killed in the attack.

Mike learned to become hard and leave his feelings behind whenever he went "outside the wire," military jargon for leaving the relative safety of the base.

"Everywhere you go, people are trying to kill you. You learn not trust anyone," he says.

War at home

When Mike returned home in March 2005, his wife noticed right away how much he had changed.

"He pretty much distanced himself to the point that whatever I did while he was gone, I continued to do," Dena says. "The bills, the children, the schooling, the doctors' appointments ... anything that needed to be taken care of here, I did."

At the time, Mike and Dena had three children, ages 4 to 10, and Dena was pregnant with their fourth child. Mike was scheduled to return to Iraq within 12 to 18 months. That didn't give him enough time to re-engage in the lives of his children, only to pull away again.

"It was like I was standing outside my house, watching my family through a window," he says.

When he did become emotional, he went off like a rocket. Mike admits he struggled with his short temper. "It was hard to control when I came back [from Iraq]," he says. "I went from zero to 90 in a half-second."

In a house with kids and dogs, the chaos and noise could be overwhelming. Once, when Mike's oldest son wouldn't stop poking his brother with a toy, Mike exploded in a flash. "I grabbed him by his throat and held him up against the wall," he says.

When one of the boys broke a wooden airplane model that belonged to his sister, Mike ordered his son to bring his favorite monster truck into the living room. Then Mike picked up a baseball bat and smashed the toy to bits.

In a war zone, instant obedience can save lives; disobedience is tantamount to mutiny. However, Mike could not distinguish between the battlefield and his living room. "My own anger scared me," he says.

He was having other problems, too. During a family road trip to Oregon to see Mike's father, Dena noticed that whenever Mike drove under a highway overpass, he would clench the steering wheel and open his mouth. In Iraq, insurgents would use overpasses to ambush convoys.

"I had to rub his arm and tell him he was OK. There were no insurgents, no bombs," Dena says.

He also struggled with searing migraines and bouts of dizziness and nausea - signs of possible traumatic brain injury.

Seeking professional help, Mike says, "was out of the question. He didn't want the Army to know he had psychological problems, "especially when your livelihood depends on your being promoted," he says.

He sought out his own forms of therapy. He began to spend a lot of time at fishing holes. "I had a hard time doing just about anything in public except for fishing," Mike says.

In many ways, he was still living as though he were deployed - putting up emotional walls and doing things that recreated the adrenaline rush he'd felt in a war zone.

While in Iraq, Mike had spent some spare time in Internet chat rooms, talking to women. For a soldier deployed thousands of miles from home, even virtual relationships could provide an outlet from the grinding tedium of life in Iraq. But one of those connections eventually led to an affair. Dena found out a few months after Mike deployed on his second tour in 2006. She was devastated. They quarreled during phone calls for the first three months of his deployment. Then Mike stopped calling.

"He pretty much told me he wasn't coming home," Dena says. "He didn't want to be a dad or a husband anymore."

Mike said he quit calling home because he felt helpless to fix his marital problems and he needed to stay focused on his mission in the war zone. When his second deployment ended in 2007, he and Dena had decided to make one last effort to save their marriage. They talked to a chaplain. They went on a marriage retreat. "It was kind of touch and go," Dena says, but at least they were living under the same roof.

About this time, Mike was put in charge of the recreation program for Fort Hood's Warrior Transition Brigade, a unit of soldiers trained to provide medical and other forms of support to wounded service members. Mike arranged fishing events in what would grow to become Take a Soldier Fishing, the nonprofit organization he runs today.

As he got to know wounded soldiers, Mike began to pay closer attention to his own medical problems. He suffered chronic headaches. He slept fitfully and suffered from nightmares. He hated crowded places - he wouldn't shop at Walmart and avoided busy restaurants. He met soldiers with similar symptoms, who were receiving treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury. Eventually, he asked for help, too.

Meanwhile, he and Dena were working together to organize fishing events. But then came one final blow to the marriage. About mid-summer in 2009, Mike told his therapist about a dream he couldn't put out of his mind. In the vision, he saw his wife lying dead in the shower. He found the image disturbing enough to bring up in therapy.

Mike wasn't prepared for what happened next. He was immediately admitted to Fort Hood's psychiatric ward for five days of observation. He says he was put there because his dream was considered a "homicidal ideation." Mike vehemently disagreed and called his confinement a huge overreaction. Eventually, he and his therapist talked again and Mike concluded that his dream probably represented the death of his marriage.

Dena says Mike's dream extinguished any hope she had for their relationship. They agreed to divorce.

Mike said they tried for almost two years to fix their marriage. "I was living with my wife and kids, trying to do the right thing," he says. "But what I thought was right and what I felt was right were two different things.

"I know it's right to stay with your wife and kids and to provide for the family. At the same time, I needed to stop worrying about everybody else and worry about me."

At a crossroads

He met Anndra when he was at a crossroads, shortly after he was discharged from his short stint on the psychiatric ward. Weary and dejected about his future, a shadow of his former vibrant self, he was living out of a duffel bag in the Army barracks. He felt frozen in place, unable to go back to the way he had lived and afraid to leap forward into the unknown.

He responded to a long and quirky personal ad from Anndra; she said she liked guys with a mischievous sense of humor. That's how Mike used to think of himself: playful and impish. They arranged to meet - and immediately connected.

Anndra empathized with Mike's PTSD. Her first husband, a Navy veteran, had suffered a massive seizure and died suddenly in her arms, when she was 21. She lost her dad when she was 25 and her mother at 28. A mother of three young boys, she felt emotionally blocked and empty.

"Within the first week of seeing her, she knew everything there was to know about me," Mike says.

Over the last year, Mike and Anndra have been living together in Belton with her sons. But they plan to move soon to Lake Sam Rayburn in East Texas. The owner of a campground in Broaddus has donated a mobile home to use as the headquarters for Take A Soldier Fishing. Mike and Anndra are cleaning it up and planning to move in with her children this fall.

Anndra is learning to deal with Mike's PTSD. Whenever the artillery range at Fort Hood is in use, the sound of cannon booming makes Mike jumpy, she says. At such times, she scratches his head and rubs his neck and shoulders.

Safe and relaxing forms of recreation, like fishing, can provide an antidote to soldiers returning from war. That's one reason Mike decided to continue running his organization after leaving the Army. It's also good for his own therapy. "Take a Soldier Fishing gives a purpose to my life," he says.

He hopes the fishing events will create stronger family bonds. During previous fishing events, wives have seen their husbands open up with other vets about the war in ways they couldn't around their own families.

"I've had spouses come up to us and say, 'I learned more in 30 minutes of listening to them war-storying than I did in two years of asking questions,' " Mike says.

He thinks a program like this might have helped him. "If I had a program like this when I came back from deployment, I might still be married," he says.

But Mike's life has always been about change. Relearning to live as a civilian won't be easy. He knows there will be setbacks - like when a turkey vulture comes out of nowhere and ruins a perfectly good trip.

That day, Mike and Anndra climbed back in their car and continued driving home. Mike spent the next 50 miles feeling tense, white-knuckling the steering wheel and straining to see through the cracked windshield. He prayed it wouldn't rain and honked the horn to scare away any critters lurking by the side of the road.

But Iraq taught Mike that there's only so much you can control. That life can change in a split second. At times, that knowledge fills him with dread, and at other times, a kind of serenity.

"For me," he says, "the grass is a little greener, the trees are a little taller and the water's a lot prettier, just knowing it can be gone in a flash."

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